Struve's analysis fails to describe in detail the process in Russia, in terms of the new classes that emerge, and the antagonistic relation between them, and this defect is present in the other chapters in Struve's book under consideration. Lenin cites as an example, Struve's comment in respect of economic development, commodity production, private property and individualism. There is a necessary correlation between these things, Struve says. Lenin notes,
“The author is quite right in his “objective” statement of “historical co-existences”; all the more pity that his argument is incompletely stated. One would like to say to him: complete the argument! reduce all these general propositions and historical notes to a definite period of our Russian history, formulate them in such a way as to show why and in precisely what way your conception differs from that of the Narodniks, contrast them with the reality that has to serve as the criterion for the Russian Marxist, show the class contradictions that are concealed by all these examples of progress and of culture.” (p 432-3)
Lenin then provides this missing content of Struve's comment. In the aftermath of the Reform, the institution of private property arises in its full form, in Russia. This may seem odd. We tend to think of private property, as in Engels' analysis, as something going back to the dawn of class society. But, what Lenin is referring to, here, is similar to that described by Rousseau. Rousseau said that property can only exist where society has created laws, and where these laws provide for a legitimate right of ownership. Without that there can be no property, only possession, i.e. I can take possession of this piece of land, or this or that object, but I cannot claim it as my exclusive property. More correctly, I can, but no legal framework exists to stand behind such a claim, and so my possession simply rests on my ability to enforce it against others' attempts to wrest possession from me.
“... it was not only introduced for the first time in all its fullness by the creation of a new “contentious” civil process which ensured the same sort of “equality” in the courts as was embodied in life by “free labour” and its sale to capital; it covered the holdings both of the landlords, rid of all obligations and duties to the state, and of the peasants, turned into peasant proprietors; it was even made the basis of the political rights of “citizens” to participate in local government (the qualification), etc.” (p 433)
So, this private property goes hand in hand with the introduction of bourgeois social relations, and it goes, hand in hand with these new legal relations, which enforce an equality between citizens before the law, an equality that reflects their position in the market place, as equal owners of commodities, whose only connection is the pure cash nexus. And, it is this same legal standing, as equal citizens that defines them in terms of political rights.
“Still more undoubted is the “tie” between our “progress” and the “principles of economic freedom”: we have already heard in Chapter I from our Narodnik how this “freedom” consisted in liberating the “modest and bearded” gatherers of Russia’s land from the need to “humble themselves to a junior police official.” We have already spoken of how the “sense of individualism” was created by the development of commodity economy. By combining all these features of Russia’s progress, one cannot but reach the conclusion (drawn, too, by the Narodnik of the seventies) that this progress and culture were thoroughly bourgeois.” (p 433)
Lenin says that the result of all this was that post-Reform Russia was much better than pre-Reform Russia. But, all of these improvements were ones brought about by the bourgeoisie, and so the producers had not benefited from it. In place of them providing surplus product, as rent, they now provided surplus value as profit. Lenin's comment that the producers had not benefited by these changes is not quite correct, and conflicts with his own later comments in respect to Economism. Even in economic terms, the development of capitalism offers the producers benefits, even if they are exploited to an even greater extent. Those benefits can't be separated from the development of the producers culturally, enabling them to liberate themselves, and end class society for good. But, it is precisely in the realm of individual rights and freedoms that the bourgeois revolution brings with it that the producers also obtain clear benefit, because it is from that that they are able to organise as a class, and thereby to engage in the political struggle.
The Narodniks, however, could not acknowledge that all of these changes were the result of the actions of the bourgeoisie, because they wanted to acknowledge those benefits whilst aiming their criticism at the bourgeoisie that had brought them about.
“To agree with that description of post-Reform Russia and “society” will be beyond the capacity of the contemporary Narodnik. And to challenge it, he would have to deny the bourgeois character of post-Reform Russia, to deny the very thing for which his distant forefather, the Narodnik of the seventies, rose up and “went among the people” to seek “guarantees for the future” among the direct producers themselves. Of course, the contemporary Narodnik will possibly not only deny it, but will perhaps seek to prove that a change for the better has taken place in the relation under review; by doing so, however, he would merely show all who have not yet seen it, that he is absolutely nothing more than the most ordinary little bourgeois individual.” (p 434)
In these examples, Lenin says he has completed the partial analysis provided by Struve, but was anything achieved by his addition, he asks? There was, Lenin concludes, because the objectivism of Struve's approach opens the danger of Russia's history and development being framed along the old lines of a determination along given paths determined by destiny. The actual development proceeds according to natural laws and logic, but that logic is not abstract. It depends upon the actual material conditions, and on the actual classes created by them, and by the actions of those classes as played out via the class struggle.
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